Fusillade

by Mike Duncan

Surreal
2001

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>INVENTORY - Paul O'Brian writes about interactive fiction

Between the non-interactive nature of each scene and the emotional disengagement I was already experiencing [from a traumatic early scene], this endless procession of vignettes started to feel grindingly tedious after a while. When the end came (and the first real option in the game, though it only makes a few paragraph's worth of difference), I was relieved.

I'm not sure if this is the response the game intended, but I doubt it. The whole thing ended up feeling more like a way for the author to show off his (admittedly impressive) MIDI composing skills than any kind of attempt at actual interactive fiction. So despite the fact that the game is pretty well-written and well-implemented (though there are a few glitches here and there), I ended up not enjoying it too much.

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- Edo, December 24, 2020

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A mishmash of 20 different scenes, August 1, 2017
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

This game contains a wide variety of scenes that are not related to each other very much, except by a small thread at the end. It includes things as diverse as Dr Who and fantasy as well as American history.

Only the main thread of the game; anything else was not implemented (for instance, you can't PRAY at Mecca).

It was interesting, but ultimately incoherent.

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- Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle), April 16, 2012

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Modelling the unconscious in vignettes, September 12, 2010
by Victor Gijsbers (The Netherlands)

Fusillade is not exactly a standard interactive fiction work. It is a string of twenty vignettes very loosely tied together by a meta-narrative that only becomes somewhat clear at the very end. In each vignette, you play a completely different person in a different setting at a different time, and sometimes even in a different fictional universe. According to the author, these scene together constitute a "battle in my unconscious".

Which immediately shows us the biggest weakness of the piece: I am certain these scenes mean something to the author, but they mean little to the reader, or at the very least they will mean little to the average reader. While a few of them are taken from fiction written by Mike Duncan himself, and are thus presumably hard to follow and devoid of associations for almost everyone, others are drawn from history and popular culture. If one already knows the relevant episodes or works, one will perhaps get a jolt of recognition, and one's own conscious and unconscious associations will be activated. But if, like me, you have to look almost all of them up to even understand what is going on, this will not happen. If you are well-acquainted with SF television series, persons from American history that are popular within but not exactly well-known without the US (Molly Pitcher, Helen Keller, Francis Scott Key), and the exploits of the great British explorers, you are probably better able than I was to enjoy this piece.

The vignettes are mostly written very well, and with different prose styles corresponding to their different moods and settings. Unfortunately, they are barely interactive -- the player is only along for the ride, really. The idea is probably that one "flows" along with them, in the sense that "flow" has become a popular-psychological term. We're on a ride planned out by the unconscious. This doesn't quite work when one does not immediately connect to the events, as described above.

One aspect of the game that cannot be ignored is the music. Each scene comes with its own piece of MIDI-music: an interpreter which can play these is highly recommended. The music helps to set the atmosphere, and is quite listenable. However, if, as I did, you spend a lot of time looking up all these historical situations, you'll be listening to each (looping) short piece for quite a bit longer than the author intended, and this is not an unmixed pleasure.

In conclusion, then, this game cannot be called a success; but it does try a couple of things that we have not often seen before, and if these attempts are not entirely successful, they are not entirely unsuccessful either. As such, Fusillade is worth studying by authors, more than worth playing by players.

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- Mark Jones (Los Angeles, California), November 17, 2009

- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), January 14, 2009


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